Phantasms of the Mutated Body: Kafka’s Critique of Anthropocentric Reason

Authors

  • Gabriele SCHWAB University of California-Irvine, gmschwab@uci.edu

Keywords:

Kafka, Odradek, dada, body, anthropocentric reason.

Abstract

This paper tries to propose an interpretation of Kafka’s Die Sorge des Hausvaters and of the strange creature called Odradek. This useless, meaningless being that is part wooden spool, part human recalls the Dadaist practices and manifestos. One can easily see Odradek as a liberated senseless object and one can even detect a certain Dadaist humor of the useless machine in his figuration, even if Kafka rejected the dada movement: “Dada is – a crime […] The spine of the soul has been broken. Faith has collapsed.” More than this, even if in Odradek one can see a critical perspective on capitalism, Kafka’s creature pushes at an extreme point the reflection on human and the non-human. This paper uses Bruno Latour and Jacques Derrida’s views in order to better understand all the complex significations Odradek can assume in a critical discourse.

Author Biography

Gabriele SCHWAB, University of California-Irvine, gmschwab@uci.edu

GABRIELE M. SCHWAB is Chancellor’s Professor, Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests are: twentieth-century comparative literature with a special emphasis on the Americas, including Native American literature; critical theory; psychoanalysis; cultural studies; literature and anthropology; feminism. She is the author of several books on these topics: Subjects Without Selves (1994), The Mirror and the Killer-Queen: Otherness in Literary Language (1996), Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (2010), Imaginary Ethnographies: Literature, Culture, Subjectivity (2012). She published also many essays on critical theory, literary theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, 19th and 20th century literatures in English (including Native American and African American), French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish.

References

DERRIDA Jacques, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. I., trans. by Geoffrey Bennington, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2009.

GOETSCHEL Willi, Kafka’s dis/Enchanted World, Columbia University, 360doc.cn

JANOUCH Gustav, Conversations with Kafka, trans. by Goronwy Rees, (2nd edition), New Directions, 1971.

LATOUR Bruno, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Harvard University Press, 2004.

MEKSIN Anya, “Ragged Bits of Meaning, Wound on a Star-Shaped Spool for Thread,” in Mauro Nervi (ed.), The Kafka Project, kafka.org

RICHTER Hans, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, Thames & Hudson, 1997.

SCHWARZ Roberto, “Worries of a Family Man”, mediationsjournal.org

STUDIA UBB DRAMATICA, Volume 61 (LXI), No. 2, October 2016

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Published

2016-10-28

How to Cite

SCHWAB, G. (2016). Phantasms of the Mutated Body: Kafka’s Critique of Anthropocentric Reason. Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Dramatica, 61(2), 91–102. Retrieved from https://studia.reviste.ubbcluj.ro/index.php/subbdramatica/article/view/4532

Issue

Volume 61, No. 2, October 2016

Section

Articles

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Copyright (c) 2016 Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Dramatica

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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